No matter what gaming forum you’re on, you’ll always see “find a game you’ve played before” posts with vague descriptions.
As long as the post owner vaguely describes the monsters, pictures or even a certain equipment in the game, someone will always be able to accurately find the unique work in the long game history based on such trivial clues.
There is also such an organization on foreign Reddit forums. The members of the group have always been very dedicated to retrieve their lost memories for netizens. In a fairly long-term development, they have formed a set of stable questioning templates, and even summed up some rules.
For example, a post with more words has a higher probability of being found, and this probability will continue to rise, and it will stabilize after about 1,000 words.
For another example, the probability of getting a solution for an adult game is much higher than that of an ordinary game.
NSFW means “Not safe for work”
Although there are not many people in the group, it is fortunate that the main members are relatively stable and the atmosphere is quite harmonious and friendly. After finding the game, the post owner will generally be very grateful, and give the answerer a loving hug, and the answerer can also gain a certain sense of pride from this enthusiastic and helpful behavior.
This vibe lasted long, until a post appeared in April of this year. Unlike other people’s ambiguous statements, this post owner can describe the basic rules and mechanics of the game in detail, but asks everyone knowingly: “What’s the name of this game?”
“A game you lose in retrospect”
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Netizens who saw this post seemed to be fooled, and returned to the “Damn you” on the ground floor. There is no other reason. This game is probably the mine that archaeological netizens don’t want to dig.
In fact, the name of the game is quite simple, as simple as only two words: “The Game”. This game, which you’ve probably never heard of, was all the rage in the first decade of this century, and in the widely circulated version, it’s been reduced to just three important ground rules:
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Whenever you think about this game you lose
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After losing you have to announce to people that you just lost a game
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By default everyone in the world is playing
In The Game’s game world, people who haven’t played The Game don’t exist because they just “forgot they were still playing the game”.
As the post said, as long as you are told the rules, or are reminded of the existence of The Game, you will be considered a loser.
(In other words, now that everyone here has “lose the game”)
This is also the reason why in the comment area of that post, netizens changed the style of rushing to answer in the past, and began to play stupid and encouraged others to answer first-everyone knows this is The Game, but no one wants to be the first Announcing that he has lost.
“Thank you for your sacrifice”
Friends who are familiar with the “white bear effect” or “pink elephant” must have a good understanding – “When someone tries not to imagine a pink elephant, he actually has this elephant in his mind. look”.
The tricky part of The Game lies in this, at least there is no way for humans to master the skills of “directed forgetting”. Brain function is doomed that we can only continuously strengthen the memory of one thing. When players persistently want to forget The Game, the associations in their brains will constantly remind themselves that The Game is everywhere.
Never look at the Bethesda logo again
Because the power of rules is too powerful, in order to prevent people from thinking about The Game, later people added many additional rules to the game. For example, every time a player thinks of The Game, there can be a 30-minute forgetting period. As long as the player successfully forgets it within these 30 minutes, there is no need to announce it to others.
Another example is to give yourself a legitimate reason to spread the game to offset the guilt and let the game spread to a certain extent and end.
There are two broad explanations, one is that it infects everyone in the world; the other is that a celebrity of considerable importance, such as the British Prime Minister or the Queen, publicly announces that they have just lost the game.
Of course, there are also people who want to take shortcuts. In 2010, someone on the 4chan forum tried to use “mysterious power” to end The Game early.
“If this post ends with the same triple digits, The Game is over forever”
But people obviously underestimated the strength of the evil characters in the human camp, and did not expect that the use of mysterious powers would be backlashed.
“If this post ends with the same three digits, The Game will start over”
The utility of these additional rules is actually almost no, after all, The Game fundamentally does not give players a choice, its only purpose is to replicate and spread among people, which is what Richard Dawkins pointed out” The definition of meme is very similar.
Therefore, The Game has become a unique stalk game. People do not participate in the game by memorizing The Game itself, but associate with The Game through everyday things, thereby creating more stalks and games.
“Don’t look at the chicken”
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The Game first appeared on the Internet in its complete form in 2002, when a netizen named “Aardvark” published it on his blog.
She listed three basic rules of the game in detail, but couldn’t say where or when the game started, the only thing she knew was that the game was very exciting – and likely to cause psychological damage.
“Psychological Trauma Warning”
This blog is the beginning of mass dissemination, and after a free ride on the Internet, the new century of communication has provided The Game with considerable power.
In 2005, Losethegame.net, The Game information site created by Jonty Haywood, appeared, where loyal players listed many ways to spread The Game. From one-click sharing of The Game to various social media, to teaching you how to hide hidden hints in the corners of stations, schools, and offices, to helping you regularly send emails to friends to “make them lose the game occasionally”.
What is worth mentioning is the various “scam links” they made. Just like Rick Roll’s stalk, the website calls on everyone to randomly drop various misleading information in chats with friends. For example, a fake link with the IronMan domain name (actually leading to The Game website) before the release of “Iron Man 3”, or the mysterious number 0119174.
0119174 is the IMDb number for David Fincher’s film “Mind Games”
In 2010, they produced a promotional video, splicing the content of “Game” and “Lose” in major film and television works into a trailer, and set the end of the world on December 12, 2012 as “” Lose The Game Day”, to spread the news of The Game widely on this day when everyone is closely watching the Internet.
Other t-shirts, water cups, and badges are not to mention. In short, they have tried every means to make the news of The Game appear on the streets, and even the official media is their goal.
In 2007, Heywood fabricated a tourist attraction “Porthemmet Beach” that didn’t exist. He produced an entire promotional page detailing the wildlife on the beach, entertainment, traditional food, cultural history, gift shops, and even local slang and artist work—just all fake.
The website page says “the best beaches in Cornwall”
This fictitious fake beach has tricked many tourists. The night after being reported by newspapers and the BBC, Heywood immediately redirected the original promotional website address to The Game website, and the number of pageviews reached 30,000 in one night.
This was seen as an example of an Internet “scam” case, and not only was the website seen by more people, but Heywood himself became famous for it.
Who would have thought he was actually a top student at Cambridge
This period was both the golden age of the website and the glorious period of The Game. On the homepage of the website, there is a fairly conspicuous map of the number of infected people around the world. It will automatically capture the user’s IP address and mark it on the map in the form of red dots. . Today, that number has reached more than 5 million.
This picture is very similar to another game in the future
It’s just the speed of the spread of tens of thousands of people a night in different glorious periods. The number of infections in The Game in the past week has averaged only 400 people per day, including the number of repeated logins.
There are probably many reasons why The Game is forgotten by people, including the explosion of information and the rapid iteration of information. But the main reason may be that The Game’s influence has gradually interfered with people’s normal lives as its influence continues to expand. Some of the jokes went too far, and some players even started bombing other people’s mailboxes with mass emails.
Only a quarter of the names are listed here
Because of its strong contagion and provocation, the longer players play, the more likely they will be affected by The Game all the time, causing them to think about The Game all the time in their lives.
In 2007, someone published a report on the psychological effects of The Game on people. Although the research method is not rigorous, and the author who wrote the report is a little immature, it still records part of the impact of The Game on people.
The experiment was started by the site’s founder, Haywood himself, who set himself up on a self-assessment form, asking him to record when and why every time he thought of The Game. But because he was so connected to The Game that he had to record every few minutes, the whole experiment was forced to stop after 14 hours.
After being inspired by Heywood, the authors of the paper found twelve subjects who had less exposure to The Game and conducted a one-month experiment.
The results are very interesting. Taken together, the key factor that makes everyone think of the game frequently is association. Since subjects had to record when and why they lost the game, most subjects lost the game as soon as they saw the note or time.
This is not limited to physical objects such as paper, pens, clocks, etc. “What time is it” with the concept of time and “what am I going to do today” may arouse the memory of The Game. The author writes:
“Random pencils and irrelevant notebooks, or even the act of just writing something down became clues to defeat, and each defeat brought me into a state where my awareness of the game was just a fine line between many objects and activities “.
People’s directional forgetting actually exists, but when the things that need to be forgotten bring emotions, directional forgetting will fail. The association of sensations also yielded a particular case in which one of the subjects experienced a strong sense of frustration when the tape was stuck on his hands—and this made him think about losing the game.
For the same reason, The Game has been banned in many places
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There are not many players who still insist on playing The Game. The end of the world in 2012 did not happen, and Lose The Game Day also disappeared. The website stopped updating after 2011, and it is a miracle that it has not yet expired.
The Game’s official Facebook has only updated two posts in the last two years, and the next one is a picture released when the new coronavirus broke out in 2020, which reads “Which one do you think the new coronavirus and The Game are? spread faster?”
There is no doubt that The Game has also become a loser in this game against the reality virus.
Lost
It’s just that The Game website is still there. In addition to the prank records of netizens, it also leaves some very precious history – the possible origin of The Game.
While reviews of the 2007 fake beach incident were mixed, it’s clear that Haywood and others took advantage of the exposure. Not only to infect more players, but also to continue to pursue the answer to the “no one knows where and when this game started” mentioned in the blog in 2002.
They always keep a section to record all possible information, and also leave contact information, hoping that more people who know the source of The Game can provide clues through the website.
The opportunity came after the scam was widely reported. A member of the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society (CUSFS) contacted Heywood via email after seeing the news in the newspaper, telling them a story about the “Finchley Station” game. This is by far The Game’s most likely answer – the origin of Finchley Station.
The so-called Finchley Station is actually a small game derived from game theory, which was created in 1969 by two students, David Fowler and John Conway. Its rules are also quite simple. Two players participating in the game have to call each other the name of the London Underground station (not necessarily in order), and whoever says “Finchley Station” first wins.
It doesn’t matter what the first one says or the second one, but doing so will definitely be despised by another player. Therefore, people will tacitly say the names of some stations, and it is common to report to the last one or two stations. The key is to “judging when the opponent will say it, and then interrupt him immediately before he wants to say it” – game with each other The process is much more interesting than just winning.
Probably this is the feeling, I named it “Lishuiqiao Station Game”
While the duo’s original intention in creating Finchley Station was to try to violate von Neumann’s concept of a zero-sum game, it wasn’t too successful in terms of results. Fortunately, John Conway didn’t forget this little achievement. After he became a teacher, he taught Finchley Station to his student in a class, and the student then passed it on to CUSFS. ‘s classmates.
In the process of passing it around, time crept up to 1982, when a CUSFS member happened to be waiting for a train at Finchley Station when he remembered the game. Inspired, he emailed his friends with a decisive rule: Whoever thinks of Finchley Station first, loses.
This decisive rule is important because in this adaptation of the Finchley Station game, players must raise their hands immediately when they lose. This means that it is no longer the word “Finchley Station” itself that prompts other players to win or lose, but the meaning of raising an arm – thus, any raised hand will trigger people’s imagination of Finchley Station.
So the prototype of The Game appeared, it spread to the people through the members of CUSFS, until it appeared in the newspaper and returned to the eyes of the creators. The full version of The Game has finally fulfilled the wishes of the two creators. Since “everyone loses” is just like “everyone does not lose”, The Game has become a win-win cooperation game that violates the concept of zero-sum game.
As for how Finchley Station evolved in the civil society in the two decades from 1982 to 2002, there is only a saying on the website: “The rest, as they say, is history.”
oops! I lost.
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